I don't think it matters to the point you may be thinking. Global collapse where everyone has to grow their own food but as a programmer one of the natural instincts is to be curios and I would imagine you could be somewhat curious to understand where your food comes from. You may also not care at all which is OK.

My wife just the last few years started to grow some food in our backyard and at one point we had chickens, granted our family would not survive on the small crop we gathered or the few eggs we got but seeing our kids (and ourselves) learn what it takes to grow a tomato or a carrot is priceless. Seeing our kids wake up in the morning and take the time to check on the seed they planted or go out to the yard and get their own lettuce and cilantro for their sandwich is priceless. Have our kids see the chicks we bought into full grown chickens and learn where the eggs come is priceless.

We don't expect our kids to become farmers, heck we don't expect us to become a full farming family but it has been great to share moments as a family and learn in the process. It is ok for us to go out to a restaurant once in a while and for a moment not care where the food came from or where our leftovers will end up at.

Take it this way. While playing a computer game, my non-technical friends don't know how the game was written, how the buttons were designed, how the server is handling all those multiple players, or how the protocol handles all the communication.

They don't try to see behind the scenes and so they just appreciate the game and nothing more.

As a software engineer with whatever limited knowledge I have about those things, I'm able to appreciate the game at even more levels. When I see a perfectly flowing graphic I wonder how the coding was done and how much effort the developers put in for creating it or how did they even come up with such a use case.

Or take the case of movies. Once you start understanding about the planning that goes behind the scenes and how such a great movie was made, you start to appreciate it even more. Whey did they keep the camera there ? Wow, they could have changed the lighting to this corner....

Same with life. The more you understand, the better you appreciate it.

The more you understand, the more you realize that most people aren't very good at what they do. Not that they are bad at what they do, either. It just takes the magic away.

"Same with life. The more you understand, the better you appreciate it."

fair enough. "learn farming" is not necessarily the next logical step though.

food is more important and under greater threat (see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...) than your TV, electricity, wood flooring, or windows.

You might want to keep an eye on the slowly collapsing US electrical grid. The number of annual major blackouts has skyrocketed over the last 20 years.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

Because you can live without all of those except for one.